Is Meaning Without Actually Exisring Reference Naturalizable?
Grazer Philosophische Studien 50:397-414 (1995)
| Abstract | According to Jerry Fodor, meaningful expressions denoting no actual entity, like „unicom", do not constitute an exception to his project of semantic naturalization based on the notion of asymmetrical dependence between causal relations. But Fodor does not give any principled reason in order to show that, say, a non-unicom caused "unicom"-token means UNICORN, as he on the contrary does regarding a non-X caused "X"-token for any existing X. Nevertheless, his claim that one such expression has a mere denotational meaning can be accounted for, though in a non-naturalistic way. Suffice it that one appeals to the weak Meinongianism contained in the thesis that one can directly refer to possible entities by means of suitable fixing reference description | |||||||||
| Keywords | Causation Language Meaning Fodor, J Meinong | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,653 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesDaniel Whiting (2009). Meaning Holism and De Re Ascription. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (4):575-599.
Ernest Lepore & Kirk Ludwig (2006). Ontology in the Theory of Meaning. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (3):325 – 335.
Daniel Whiting (2008). Meaning Holism and de Re Ascription. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (4):pp. 575-599.
Kenneth R. Livingston (1993). What Fodor Means: Some Thoughts on Reading Jerry Fodor's A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Philosophical Psychology 6 (3):289-301.
Martha I. Gibson (1996). Asymmetric Dependencies, Ideal Conditions, and Meaning. Philosophical Psychology 9 (2):235-59.
Douglas Patterson (2005). Learnability and Compositionality. Mind and Language 20 (3):326–352.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads5 ( #160,204 of 548,984 )Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
